The Bears Curse – Justin Fields or Caleb Williams?
Justin Fields or Caleb Williams?
That’s the question the Bears now face three months before the 2024 NFL Draft. For this franchise, it’s a new position to find themselves. While I can’t claim the most tortured fan base in sports, we’ve won a Super Bowl (albeit 15 years before I was born) and have made the playoffs a handful of times in the 21st century, our predicament is unique. We’re the poorest franchise at the most important position. The only NFL team to never have a 4000-yard quarterback. And now we find ourselves stuck between a rock and a generational talent.
I watched Caleb Williams eviscerate the Stanford Cardinal live earlier this year with my jaw on the floor. He has a chance to be the next evolution in his position. But we do have another option. The most physically gifted runner at the position, Justin Fields.
This is a team that passed on Patrick Mahomes for Mitchell Trubisky. They traded the farm for Jay Cutler. It’s hard for me not to believe they’ll mess this up. I want to examine why I think they’ll do that and why I’m still a fan of this silly, ancient franchise in the first place.
This is a team that passed on Patrick Mahomes for Mitchell Trubisky. They traded the farm for Jay Cutler. It’s hard for me not to believe they’ll mess this up. I want to examine why I think they’ll do that and why I’m still a fan of this silly, ancient franchise in the first place.
Quarterbacks of Bears Past
I’m really showing my age here, but I don’t remember the 2006 Super Bowl. My Dad likes to tell the story about how he woke up both my infant sister and a family friend’s child when Devin Hester took the kickoff back. I wish I could remember the highest point of the Bears in my lifetime, but sadly my first memory of the Bears involves Kyle Orton. It’s the fall of 2008, and I’m 8 years old, watching DA Bears. October 19th, to be exact. I know this because that’s the only game that season they wore their awful orange alternates, which to an 8-year-old are the coolest uniform in sports history. I lived in Pompano Beach, Florida, about an hour north of Miami. But my dad would be damned if he let me be a fan of the Chad Pennington Miami Dolphins and not his hometown Bears. Kyle Orton delivers a 7-yard curl route to Marty Booker, who explodes past 4 Vikings defenders to take it 51 yards to the house. Bears win 48-41 in a heater.
As I rewatch the game, I’m Mathew McConaughey in Interstellar, begging my Dad to put on Ricky Williams highlights.
Anthony Bourdain described Chicago the best. In Parts Unknown, he states how there are very few cities in America where you can look out the window and know where you are. But in Chicago, you immediately know that “You are in a big, brash, muscular, broad-shouldered motherf***in’ city. A metropolis, completely non-neurotic, ever-moving. A big-hearted but cold-blooded machine with millions of moving parts. A beast that will, if disrespected or not taken seriously, roll over you without remorse.” This is also the best description of how Chicago treats its quarterbacks.
The season that hooked me into this miserable team would also be the last for journeyman Kyle Orton, the first Bears quarterback I remember. The following offseason, he was traded in a blockbuster to the Denver Broncos along with a 1st and a 3rd round draft pick for the man who would come to define the Bears for nearly a decade, Smokin’ Jay Cutler. Of course, he wasn’t Smokin’ Jay yet, having just come off of a Pro Bowl season for the Broncos in which he threw for 4526 yards and 25 touchdowns. This looked like a refresh for the Lovie Smith Bears. They had re-loaded their 2005 NFC Champion team with new talent and a real quarterback. Sure, Cutler had a bit of an interception problem, but the Packers won a ton of games with Favre, so who cares?!
It’s November 20th, 2011, at Soldier Field. I’m 12 now, and I’m at the game. We’re in the nosebleeds, facing the winds of Lake Michigan. It’s below freezing at kickoff and dropping. I’m there with my Dad and Grandfather, happily drinking hot chocolate in my too-thin Florida winter coat. The Bears are happy too. Things seem to come together two and a half years into the Cutler experiment. DA Bears were back. A disappointing 2009 season with Cutler was far in the rearview after an NFC Championship appearance in 2010 that nearly resulted in a win. Sure, we lost to our bitter rival Green Bay Packers, but it was a one-score game in the snow that could have gone either way. And we were good again; at 6-3 Chicago was primed for another Super Bowl run. After a shaky start to the season, Jay Cutler was playing the best football of his career.
I don’t want to hyperbolize the career of a bang-average quarterback, but Jay Cutler was proto-Patrick Mahomes. After four years at Vanderbilt, he exploded onto the NFL scene in Denver. He could make any throw from any position. I’m serious when I say that Jay’s arm was Mahomes caliber. He even had the slipperiness to slide around the pocket, avoiding sacks before unleashing the hardest-thrown balls in the sport. Now, unfortunately, those piss-missiles usually land in the hands of the defense. Jay Cutler was intercepted on 3.3% of his passes as a Chicago Bears QB. The only other players with higher percentages over that span were Mark Sanchez and Ryan Fitzpatrick, both journeymen playing on three and five different teams respectively.
So, I’m in the stands of Soldier Field, watching my team destroy the San Diego Chargers. Two rows below me, a Bears fan and a Chargers fan get into a fight after the Bears fan poured nearly frozen beer on the Chargers guy. Naturally, the Chargers fan was thrown out. Chicago protects their own. Down on the field, the Bears are cruising. It’s a slog, but the vaunted Monsters of the Midway are locking down Phillip Rivers and the Chargers. With 5:00 left in the 3rd quarter, Charles ‘Peanut’ Tillman knocks the ball away from Chargers running back Ryan Mathews using his patented “Peanut Punch” and then recovers his own forced fumble. Tillman would go on to join the FBI after retiring and is my favorite player in Bears history.
This puts the Bears in excellent field position to put this game away. Cutler play fakes to running back Matt Forte before sliding forward to avoid a Charles Laboy sack attempt on the first play of the ensuing drive. Cutler casually flips the ball off-platform 30 yards on a dot to Johnny Knox in the back of the endzone.
See where the proto-Mahomes comp comes from? This gave the Bears a 31-17 lead, potentially putting the game away. We considered leaving, but tickets were expensive, and watching your team win is always fun.
10:02 to go in the 4th quarter. Bears are driving again in Chargers territory, looking to finish the game for good. Cutler steps back and rips a throw to Johnny Knox on a 12-yard in. Regrettably, Johnny Knox isn’t there because he slipped and fell 2 yards earlier. Instead, the ball is intercepted by Antoine Cason, who takes off looking for a pick-six. Jay takes off after him despite Cason having big Everette Brown and Donald Butler as a blocking convoy. Cutler tries in vain to get to Cason before getting planted by Butler, never getting more than a single hand on him. Luckily, Matt Forte pushes him out of bounds at the 17. Unluckily, Jay Cutler got one hand on Cason, his right, and broke his thumb.
The legend of Smokin’ Jay is born. The Bears hung on to win the game but Cutler was out for the rest of the year, leaving backup Caleb Hanie to go 1-5, missing the playoffs.
Lovie Smith would be fired a year later after losing to the Packers in the last game of the year and missing the playoffs again. The team would hire Marc Trestman and the new Monsters of the Midway would fall apart. The Bears wouldn’t even make the playoffs for another seven years. Later that night we celebrated at Michael Jordan’s Steakhouse on Michigan Avenue, as my dad’s favorite NASCAR driver, Tony Stewart, won his 3rd championship. The next day we’d hear about Cutler and watch our team implode, but that night in that big, brash, motherf***in city, we were happy.
Sufjan Stevens is a musician/singer/artist hailing from Detroit. He has ten studio albums and countless singles. His most famous is probably “Chicago” off his album “Illinois.” When Stevens was younger and going through a tough time, he would drive from Detroit to Chicago, wandering around the streets feeling boundlessly optimistic for the future. The people of Chicago had also fallen in love again. The year is 2018, and I’m boundlessly optimistic about the future of my Chicago Bears. I’m a 19-year-old college sophomore at Boston University. Ironically, I didn’t watch much of their first winning season in 8 years due to the whole college thing. I didn’t have a TV and could only catch a handful of games. I had fallen in love too, having started dating a girl from Chicago. We’d try and watch games together.
The Bears had built something I hadn’t ever seen from them: a fun offense. Second-year QB Mitchell Trubisky was shaky after a rookie season under lame-duck HC John Fox. Still, first-year head coach and play caller Matt Nagy compensated with a unique scheme and a viscous two-headed run game from Tarik Cohen and Jordan Howard. Nagy made “Be You” the calling card reminder on his play sheet. He even reached into history and ran DT Akiem Hicks up the middle for a touchdown a la “Refrigerator” Perry. They went 12-4 and made the playoffs.
I watched that playoff game with my Dad at their new home in Dallas. The Bears were facing the defending champion Eagles. The game was a brutal and tedious slog that doesn’t bear (heh) going into detail. All you need to know is that throughout the season, the Bears were winning despite kicker woes. Veteran Cody Parkey had issues kicking in the windy Chicago lakefront. Helicopters hovered over Soldier Field, observing Parkey practicing during the week, trying to get a handle on the gusts. It seemed he had pulled it together though, going 3 for 3 in the game. The Bears have a chance to win. After a failed 2-point conversion, they find themselves a 43-yard field goal from their first playoff win since 2010.
The rest is history. The ball is tipped at the line, glancing off the left upright, then the crossbar. The “Double Doink” is coined by announcer Chris Collinsworth shortly after.
It travels over water, echoing across Lake Michigan and the entire city of Chicago. I thought I could hear it in Texas. The “Double Doink” basically ends this new upstart Bears team before they ever got going. Trubisky never pans out, and Nagy regresses into a scared play caller. They’ll sneak into the playoffs two years later only to get rolled by the last breaths of the Drew Brees Saints. Mitchell “Kissin Titties” is named NVP after the game and is digitally slimed on national television. All things go, all things go.
Justin Fields - Quarterbacks of Bears Present
The Bears draft Justin Fields on April 29, 2021. I’m 21 years old and about to graduate. After years of mediocrity, we got our guy. Fields was a multiple-time All-American from Ohio State with every measurable known to man. How he slips to being the 4th QB off the board, I’ll never understand. It’s unfortunate that he’s stuck with a lame-duck head coach in Matt Nagy, but it makes sense to give him another shot with a different quarterback. Just like Justin, I’m moving to Chicago. That girl is getting her master’s at UChicago, and we get our first apartment together in Hyde Park, a block from the Museum of Science and Industry and the lakefront. I get a low-paying job at a camera rental house, hoping to chase my indie filmmaker dreams.
Much like my time in Chicago, it’s the friends we made along the way for Justin Fields. Nagy is fired, and the Bears bring in Colts DC Matt Eberflus. Fun fact, my sister was elementary school friends with Coach Eberflus’ daughter while he was the linebackers coach for the Dallas Cowboys. Matt is an old-school football guy. Preaches the H.I.T.S principle (Hustle, Intensity, Takeaways and (playing) Smart). Bend don’t break defense. He goes 3-14 his first year.
The good news is Justin Fields is a freak of nature athlete. He’s second only to Lamar Jackson as a runner at the quarterback position. Sure, he holds onto the ball too long, but look at the potential! The Bears trade the first overall pick in the draft for a haul: DJ Moore, two firsts, and a second. We draft a franchise right tackle, Darnell Wright. For all of that, the Bears only improve to 7-10. The city is divided throughout the season. Flashes from Fields lead to debates over his future with the team. The fans love him when he plays well. He’s the first player to make you feel like it could be a touchdown every time he touches the ball since Devin Hester. But too often the offense stagnates at inopportune times. These flashes cause them to overhaul the offensive coaching staff and retain Eberflus. Are you seeing a lame-duck HC pattern here? The Bears luck into the first overall pick again through their trade with the Panthers. Only this time, there’s a can’t-miss prospect on the horizon.
I moved to Los Angeles during the NFL season in the fall of 2023. After two years in Chicago, it’s time to move on. I married that girl from Chicago at the Garfield Park Conservatory in June. For that, Chicago will always have a place in my heart. It’s the reason you’re reading this now since I met Adam there. I had my dreams fulfilled and crushed, made incredible friends. But it wasn’t for me. I turned to the sunny skies of Los Angeles.
The Bears might be doing that too. One of the main reasons I moved is my wife is beginning her doctorate at the University of Southern California. Coincidentally, that’s where the Bears are turning to for their future.
Caleb Williams - Quarterbacks of Bears Future?
I never went to a Bears game in my two years in Chicago. Not once. Even when tickets were cheap, living there, you learn that the city is brain-poisoned. “The Chicago Bears win with a stacked roster, grit, and toughness,” says a local AM radio guy who still thinks it’s 1985. The Bears need to move into the 21st century. I thought Justin Fields would be the guy, but he isn’t consistent enough, as much as we want him to be. I don’t know if Caleb Williams is the guy either. His camp has taken great pains over the last month to push the narrative that he IS interested in Chicago, despite the reputation for being where quarterbacks go to die.
The Bears have a lot of options to weigh. On the one hand, they can hang on to Fields, the most physically gifted Bears QB ever (not a deep list) and trade the first pick for a haul. You could stack the roster and try and make a run this year. The drawback to this is betting on Fields. If he never becomes a consistent threat at the position, best case scenario you’re the 2020-2022 49ers scrambling for a QB as your roster’s Super Bowl window shrinks every year. Worst case you miss on all of the picks and Caleb Williams is a superstar elsewhere.
The other option is to just draft Williams. If he’s good…Great! You have a franchise guy. The Bears still have quite a few spare picks including another in the top ten this year, meaning even if you don’t get the first pick haul, there are still plenty of assets to build the team. Williams also resets the QB contract clock, they won’t have to pay him a big contract for 5 seasons. But if he doesn’t pan out and they’re looking for a QB again in 3 years…well they’d just be the Bears.
The team once again heads into the next season with an uncertain future at every major position. The McCaskey family continues to coast on the size of the market and one Super Bowl win 38 years ago. Their coaching staff continues to fail whatever poor sap they decide to throw behind center. I wish I had the answer for which one of these options is the right choice. Just like I wish my first memory of the Bears was the Devin Hester kick return. But it isn’t, it’s Kyle Orton, and my history with the Bears tells me that neither decision is the right one. The Chicago Bears are “a beast that will, if disrespected or not taken seriously, roll over you without remorse.” They rolled over Kyle Orton, Jay Cutler, and Mitchell Trubisky. They’ll probably roll over Justin Fields and Caleb Williams too.
